(For updates on the latest news around the Hulu Facebook Connect integration, please go here: http://blog.hulu.com/2011/07/01/hulu-facebook-connect-update)

Do you remember when?

I knew Dwight’s stint as manager of the Scranton office would end with hilarious results. But did I see that coming? Not in a million years. But of course, the moment he strutted out with his holster (and gun!), it was clear that Dwight’s dream would come to an end with explosive results. And when the gun went off—luckily damaging only Andy’s hearing—I immediately jumped on Facebook to see what my friends had to say. Of course, this exact moment was the talk of Hulu in the morning.

TV has always been a social experience. We gather with friends and family to watch our favorite shows, sporting events, movies, and news. When we get to work, we meet around the water cooler and chat about Tracy Jordan’s latest stunt in the previous night’s 30 Rock. We text each other during the results of The Voice, and we blog about the latest politician skewered in Jon Stewart’s opening monologue.

Today, we are making the Hulu experience even more social with Facebook on Hulu.

Interact. We are excited to announce a new feature that is the first-of-its-kind and one that we think will become a staple at Hulu going forward. One of the most exciting features we are launching today is the ability to comment on a specific moment in time while watching any video on Hulu, and with one click, instantly share those remarks — and the relevant video moment from the program — on Facebook for all your friends to see. When you comment on a Hulu video, that exact moment will appear on Facebook so your friends can jump in and react right away. And since friends can respond to your comments, you can have those water cooler conversations online at any time. We’ve been using this feature in test mode here at Hulu HQ for a bit…and we are officially addicted. We hope you enjoy it as much as we do.

Personalize. Now you can easily log on to Hulu—or create a new account—using your Facebook account. From there, you’ll be able to interact with all of your Facebook friends. You’ll log into a homepage tailored to you, where you can see your friends’ favorite shows, and start conversations with anybody who follows the same shows you do.

Discover. I discovered some of my favorite shows (like Coupling—the UK version, of course) because a friend recommended them. With Facebook on Hulu, you can introduce your friends to shows you’re rooting for, and discover new favorites with the help of your friends, too.

Connect. To link your Hulu and Facebook accounts, use the “Connect” button on your next visit to Hulu. Or visit http://www.hulu.com.

The entire social experience on Hulu is being supported by our partners at Coors Light and Microsoft’s decision engine Bing. Bing is also providing a free 1-month Hulu Plus subscription to users who make the decision to “go social” by signing up for Facebook on Hulu.

We’re very excited about the above efforts which we believe make TV fundamentally more social. Let us know what you think!

This morning, we released the latest version of Hulu Plus for the PlayStation®3. The update improves the quality of the playback experience, specifically addressing issues such as skips, jumps, and stalls that may occur on certain network connections.

You’ll be presented with the update (v1.01) the next time you launch the Hulu Plus app on PS3. Improvements in this version include:

– Improvements and fixes for playback issues such as skipping, jumping, and stalling.
– Improved playback reporting to help our team improve the playback experience.
– UI tweaks to compensate for device overscan.
– Added ability for new users to sign up for a Hulu Plus subscription within the application.
– Additional improvements and bug fixes.

Let us know what you think!

Daniel Bear
Senior Development Lead, Hulu

Just in time for the holidays, we’ve unwrapped some new goodies to share with our users on Hulu.com: playlists and a new way to browse the site.

We’re always looking for new ways to make watching TV on Hulu more fun, and playlists now put our users in control: now you can create and share your own playlists with your friends and the rest of the Hulu community. Think you’re an expert on all things Saturday Night Live? Create a definitive playlist. Want to save an assortment of videos to watch back-to-back later? Create a playlist. Simply click on the “+” symbol near a video on Hulu and select the “Add to playlist” option. Create a new playlist or add the video to an existing list; later, you can enter descriptions for the video from the new “Playlists” tab in your Profile.

From your profile view, you can browse all of your playlists, write descriptions, and also set your privacy preferences. (Videos that are set to “public” can be browsed from our new Playlists hub and viewed by the entire Hulu community.) I’ve already created one about two of my favorite guys on TV, Troy and Abed from Community, but you can also explore Hulu’s Editors’ picks from the main Playlists hub. Over time, we’ll be highlighting our favorite users playlists on this page; if you’d like to submit yours for consideration, feel free to send a link to me at rebecca.harper@hulu.com.

To navigate to Playlists from our home page, you’ll want to check out our new navigation bar at the top of the page. We’ve streamlined the options here, consolidating links to TV, Movies, Trailers, and Playlists in a single “Browse” drop-down that also includes our Coming Soon page — a great way to preview which videos are coming to Hulu in the next week — and Genres (formerly known as channels), where you can browse by category.

Back in the navigation bar, the “Most Popular” and “Recently Added” links will help you reach your destination more quickly, whether you’re looking for the most recent episode of your favorite show or today’s most popular movie trailer. This is just the latest in a series of projects that will allow you to not only find your favorite content quickly and easily, but also discover new content that maybe you didn’t realize we had at Hulu.

Happy Holidays from all of us at Hulu!
Rebecca Harper (rebecca.harper@hulu.com)
Editor

To celebrate our 5 week long holiday promotion, we reached out to Los Angeles-based artist Justin Martin to create an original drawing to capture the essence of the holidays. In his untitled wintry illustration, he portrays a young family walking home in the sunset from a day of sledding in the snow. Below is a brief Q&A with the artist. Be sure to check out more of his work on his blog. — The Hulu Team

What are you currently working on?
My 9 to 5 gig- though it is anything but- is as Background Painter at Warner Bros. Animation. I’m currently working on a new series called “The Looney Tunes Show”, due to air in 2011 on Cartoon Network.
I’m also creating all the artwork for a new graphic novel with the working title Badge of the Guardian, about a young boy who goes on a wild adventure in Outer Space.
Mainly, however, I’m trying to play the role of Dad for my 11 month old daughter. Maybe I should have started with that, as it’s unquestionably its own full time job.

What has been your most unusual project?
That’s a tough call. Each project has its own unique quirkiness. That’s a major reason why I opted to go into the Animation Industry. I’ve made monsters with tank turret underwear attacking the Golden Gate Bridge, space pirates who listen to Reggae while “beaming up” unsuspecting human prisoners, and an evil genius beaver who lives in the Hoover Dam. The weirdness just doesn’t stop around these parts.

On second thought, though, I might go with the whole fatherhood thing again. That certainly fits the “unusual” criteria.

Where do you find your inspiration?
Anywhere and everywhere I can. I’ve always thought that one of the most important lessons an artist can learn is to maintain constant awareness. There’s a Huxley book called Island in which talking birds are trained to fly around saying only the word “Attention”. I need one of those birds.
Instead I try to carry a camera with me everywhere I go, and to always have a book going. I have an “inspiration” section on my own blog that I stopped updating a long time ago because the list just got too enormous. It’s really staggering how many amazing artists there are out there, each with his or her own viewpoint, medium, or technique.

What is your favorite subject matter?
Anything thought provoking. I like to make pieces that you have to take a closer look at, so the subject has to have some depth to it. (See earlier answer re: space pirates and evil genius beavers.)

Do you prefer to use a pencil and paper, or a Wacom Tablet?
I generally sketch on paper in the early stages and move to digital a little later down the line. Some day I intend to get back to much more traditional media, but some of the chemicals involved aren’t so good for babies so it may be a while. Until then digital is nice and clean.

What are you favorite shows on Hulu?
I loves me some Arrested Development and 30 Rock. Modern Family is also great. We saw the guy that plays the dad who always slips on the stairs when we were out the other day. Part of me wanted to pull his earbuds out just so I could tell him how awesome he is.

Hulu Plus version 1.2 went live in the iTunes App Store yesterday. The app runs on all devices at or above iOS 3.2.

The list of tweaks and additions is far too long for this post, but here are some of the key improvements we’ve put into version 1.2:

• - More intuitive behavior around receiving notifications (e.g., calendar, SMS, or phone calls) while in the app
• - Improved resume functionality
• - Better cross-device synching
• - More search results

Beyond these, we’ve made many improvements to the Hulu Plus app’s stability and playback performance, especially when playing videos at high bit rates.

We’ve got a lot more updates across all our apps planned for the coming months. Stay tuned!

Zach Holt
Lead Software Developer, Hulu

P.S. If you’re looking for an exciting job at the intersection of media and technology, check out our jobs list.

Today we’re releasing several exciting updates to Hulu, most notably a new version of the Hulu video player. We’ve posted an overview of the new player, complete with an introductory video, here. And you can experience the changes for yourself throughout the site. Given the breadth of the changes, what I thought I’d do here on the blog is give more of a behind-the-scenes look at the thinking that went into the new releases.

Let’s start with the new Hulu player. Around the office we referred to this as Project Voltron after the ’80s animated TV series. Just as five robot lions combined to form Voltron in that show, many different components came together to make up the new Hulu player. A convergence of several forces — the availability of new technologies, lingering ideas from the product team, and user feedback — underlie this refresh of our player, but the primary motivation remained the same as always: elevate the experience of watching videos on Hulu.

Adaptive Bitrate Streaming
The new player is written in ActionScript 3, and among other things, that enabled us to launch adaptive bitrate streaming. Previously, we could downshift the bitrate of our video stream if we detected the user experiencing video playback issues for reasons like diminished internet bandwidth. With adaptive bitrate streaming, we can now shift video bitrates and resolution up and down continually to match the user’s bandwidth. In the hierarchy of video playback issues, we believe frame rate inconsistency or video stuttering is more disruptive to users than a decrease in resolution, and adaptive bitrate streaming is designed for that prioritization.

You can turn on adaptive bitrate streaming in our new video settings menu in the player. That menu also allows you to force the player to stream at a fixed resolution of 480p, 360p, or 288p, but we recommend that you select adaptive bitrate streaming. When it’s on, you can rest easy knowing Hulu is offering you the smoothest playback at the highest resolution possible for your bandwidth.

Ad Volume Normalization
Another feature that will improve the viewing experience on Hulu is one you can’t see, but will hear, instead: ad volume normalization. There’s a widespread myth that broadcasters and even Hulu would boost commercial audio levels, but it’s just that, a myth. In the past, we tried to normalize ad volume to content volume globally, but that wasn’t a perfect fix because content comes to Hulu with differing audio levels, and you can only raise the audio levels so much before you’re simply magnifying background noise. In particular, many masters for older titles have really low audio levels, and producing new masters is often impossible or prohibitively expensive.

Our new ad volume normalization feature handles volume adjustments on the fly. As our player approaches an ad break, it begins analyzing the audio level of the content. When the ad is called, the player compares the content’s most recent audio levels with a precomputed audio value for the ad and brings them into line dynamically.

Closed Captioning Display
For closed captions, we’ve added two new display options in addition to our original white text display, so now you can also choose yellow text, or white text on a solid black background. Each of the new options should improve the visibility of captions for most scenarios.

Seek Preview
When you hover your mouse cursor on our new player timeline, we now display a preview thumbnail of that spot in the video. This should vastly improve the accuracy of seeking around in a video. Since seeking past an ad break can trigger an advertisement before the video resumes playing, we wanted to do as much as possible to ensure our users get to the exact moment they’re searching for on the first try.

Heat Map
If you don’t have an exact moment in mind but are curious to discover particular moments of interest within a full episode or full-length movie, we’ve now ported the heat map from our captions tab to the drop-down pane below the player. Captions and the heat map never had any intrinsic relationship, and this move allows us to display the heat map on all long-form videos, even those without captions.

The width of the heat map aligns to the width of the new timeline exactly. The heights of the bars in the heat map indicate the relative popularity of various sections of that video. Hover over any bar and the corresponding preview thumbnail will appear above the video timeline. Click on any bar to jump to that place in the video. The heat map in conjunction with the visual timeline adds another powerful tool to the viewer’s seek toolbox.

A Bigger, Sleeker Player
That’s a look under the hood of the new player. We’ve also refreshed the design. For starters, we wanted to increase the size of our base in-browser player. We no longer scale the 480p video down. At its native resolution of 720 x 404px, our new video player is 25 percent larger in viewing area than our previous player.

The default view of the player is now chromeless, meaning it’s clear of any controls, which gives it a cleaner look. The old Hulu player had a timeline visible at all times, but the new player displays the timeline only on mouseover and keeps the timeline height and width fixed.

The fullscreen button has shifted to the lower right of the player. The new location is also consistent across all the different incarnations of our player: regular, fullscreen, pop-out, embed, and off-Hulu (i.e. on our distribution partner sites like Yahoo). Many web video players have the fullscreen button there, and this control is used frequently enough that adhering to this unofficial standard location seemed prudent.

We’ve also renamed continuous play “autoplay” and have shifted the controls into the player itself. Previously those controls sat outside the player in a continuous play bar, but this feature generates enough usage to have earned a permanent integration into our player controls. At the same time, we’ve reduced the autoplay control footprint by replacing the “next video” button with the more universal icon for skip and by moving the autoplay playlist selector into a pop-over menu.

In the old player, we had a left and right column outside the player that held additional controls like pop-out or embed. These have all moved to the right of the player now. Since the player itself is bigger, menus for options like embedding or sharing videos have grown in size also. Rather than add more options with the additional real estate, we’ve left the controls largely the same as it lends a more airy, spacious feel.

You can still customize the start and end points of the video you share, as well as select a custom thumbnail for any video you wish to embed. With the increased timeline width in those menus, it’s easier to do so with precision. The one new option is the ability to select between two sizes of video player to embed.

We made a few other subtle design updates. When you pause a video, the buffer indicator is now at the top, and we now display the current video resolution to its left. In pause mode we used to display a large play icon in the center of the video player as a cue. We’ve shrunk that button, and after a few seconds of inactivity, it now fades out completely and only returns on mouseover. Lastly, our new player will shrink the video window down when it encounters end credits, devoting more player real estate to suggest other videos to watch. We can tell from view-through data that most users aren’t interested in the end credits. But if you are, you can still restore full-size view with one click. We won’t shrink end credits if the show inserts additional content after the end credits.

An Aside on HTML5
Those are the highlights of our new player. Before we move on to the other updates to our site today, let me address a related topic that’s been in the news a lot recently: HTML5. Plenty of users and members of the press ask about this topic all the time.

When it comes to technology, our only guiding principle is to best serve the needs of all of our key customers: our viewers, our content partners who license programs to us, our advertisers, and each other. We continue to monitor developments on HTML5, but as of now it doesn’t yet meet all of our customers’ needs. Our player doesn’t just simply stream video, it must also secure the content, handle reporting for our advertisers, render the video using a high performance codec to ensure premium visual quality, communicate back with the server to determine how long to buffer and what bitrate to stream, and dozens of other things that aren’t necessarily visible to the end user. Not all video sites have these needs, but for our business these are all important and often contractual requirements.

That’s not to say these features won’t be added to HTML5 in the future (or be easier to implement). Technology is a fast-moving space and we’re constantly evaluating which tools will best allow us to fulfill our mission for as many of our customers as possible.

That’s a look at the new Hulu player. Let’s turn to advertising.

Introducing Ad Tailor
The launch of the new Hulu player today also enables us to release a new ad personalization feature which we call Ad Tailor. The goal of Ad Tailor is to increase the relevance of ads for our viewers.

Ad Tailor works in two ways. One is that we now offer the user the option to give us immediate feedback on every video ad’s relevance. In the upper right of every video ad, we ask “Is this ad relevant to you?” and offer a yes and a no button. These buttons replace our old “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” buttons on ads. The new wording is deliberate since the thumbs up and down iconology might suggest that we were interested primarily in your subjective opinion of the ad creative when what’s more critical for us is understanding whether the product or service being shown is relevant to you. We can’t alter our advertisers’ creative, but we can control which ads we show you. We’ll use your feedback to adjust which ads we show you in the future.

Ad Tailor tries to improve ad relevance in another way. Occasionally, when you’re watching a video, we’ll also serve up a single or multi-question survey in place of an advertisement. Answer any single question and we’ll return you to your video immediately, and answer any multiple question survey and we’ll reward you with some ad-free viewing. Answering these questions is always optional, and any responses given will be kept confidential.

The more efficiently we can match ads up with users, the more everyone benefits. Users see more relevant ads, and advertisers reach a more targeted and receptive audience.

When we use Ad Tailor to personalize an ad we show you, you’ll see a brief visual cue at the start of the ad: in the upper right corner we’ll display “This ad brought to you by Ad Tailor.” The more feedback you provide, the more we’ll be able to personalize the selection of ads we show you.

More Customization
The last update to our site today is a refresh of our three homepages: the main Hulu homepage, the TV homepage, and the Movies homepage.

One of the primary goals of the homepage refreshes was to add a new layer of personalization. If you’re signed in to Hulu, we’ll recommend shows just for you in the masthead at the top of the page. You can now change what we display in the left two columns of all three homepages through the dropdown header, and we’ll retain your preferences from session to session. We’ve added a My Videos section to each homepage that allows signed-in Hulu users to look at their queue, subscriptions and viewing history without leaving the homepage. At the bottom of all three homepages, just above the footer, we’ve added a recommendations carousel. If you’re signed in, we’ll recommend shows based on your past viewing, but if you’re not logged in, we’ll pull from a long list of our favorite shows and movies from our catalog.

Other changes to the layout of the homepage balance what we’ve learned from user behavior on the site and what we’re interested in helping users discover in the months to come. Like many sites, we’re constantly striking a balance between surfacing what users already like and what they don’t know they will like. With our catalog having grown to hundreds of content partners and thousands of titles, the most efficient way to do that is evolving.

Here in Los Angeles, where the weather seems to be sunny every day, it’s easy to lose track of what season it is. But we like to think of this as a spring refresh. As always, your feedback is welcome.

Happy viewing,
Eugene Wei (eugene.wei@hulu.com)
VP of Product, Hulu

Update: We have started a discussions thread for updates from our support team here.

Today we’ve added a new beta feature to the site in Hulu Labs: Captions Search. You can now search the captions for thousands of videos across hundreds of shows.

You can initiate a captions search from the Hulu Labs page for the feature, but the more permanent home for captions search is in the new Captions tab on any show or video page for any program with captions.

Recently I watched an episode of House, and they made a funny joke about the resemblance between Dr. Foreman (Omar Epps) and Pittsburgh Steelers coach Mike Tomlin. I couldn’t remember which episode it was in, let alone which moment of within the episode.

With the new caption search, I just type in “mike tomlin”, and voila.

If you just want a quick preview of the search result, hover your mouse cursor over the image and a short segment of video around the search term will play in the thumbnail. To see it at full size, click on the search result text and we’ll send you to that spot in the full-size video. (House knows about football? He truly is a man for all seasons.)

One bonus that comes with caption search is what we’re calling the heat map. This is a visual graph of the user interest throughout the span of a video and is available on any captioned video that has accumulated enough user views. It appears at the top of the captions tab for those videos. We analyze a variety of viewer behaviors to generate the heat map.

The first use for the heat map is as a navigation tool: You can click on any bar in the graph to jump to that section of captions. If you search the captions for a video, we’ll highlight bars in blue in the heat map to indicate where the matching results appear in the video.

But a second use is to find particularly popular segments within that video. For many videos, interest is fairly linear across a program, but for some shows, the pattern reveals intriguing spikes.

For example, here’s the heat map for one episode of a popular show on our site.

You’ll notice a peak about three-fourths of the way through the video. This is the ninth episode of Glee, titled “Wheels,” and that mesa in the graph represents one of the musical numbers for which the show has become so beloved, in this case a performance of “Defying Gravity.”

In fact, in almost every episode of Glee you’ll find these peaks in the heat map corresponding to the musical numbers. In the episode “Mattress,” the peak about halfway through is for the kids’ performance of Van Halen’s “Jump” (with a smaller but visible crest just a few minutes earlier for a cover of Lily Allen’s “Smile”).

Lest you think Glee is the only show capitalizing on this music craze, check out this episode of The Colbert Report. What is that Everest of viewer interest at the end of the episode? Let’s just say we’re convinced now, there’s nothing Colbert can’t do.

In the Pilot of V, what is the spike about eight minutes into the episode? Hint: hello, Morena Baccarin!

As this feature is still in beta, we’re curious to see how you use it and what you’d like to see from it. Your feedback, as always, is welcome at feedback@hulu.com.

Happy holidays!

Eugene Wei (eugene.wei@hulu.com)
VP, Product

Today, as part of Hulu for the Holidays, we’ve added a new default view for your queue, one that groups all the videos within it by show. Before, you could sort everything in your queue by show by clicking on the Title and Information column header, but it wasn’t always clear that was how you’d do it. As we’ve added more content and as users’ queues have grown in size, grouping by show as a default was a logical update. Visit your queue today to experience the new queue layout firsthand.

Within this new layout we offer two display options. One is a vertical text list of videos within each show, a layout that may be familiar to those of you who use DVRs.

The other is a more visual layout with thumbnails laid out in horizontal carousels, more of an echo of the carousels on our show pages.

In either view, click on the “Play All” link above the videos to play from the oldest to the most recently aired videos for that show. As before, clicking on any video within a show in your queue will activate Autoplay, but in this new “group by show” view, we’ll only play through all the videos from that particular show.

Want to try out the new queue but don’t have many videos in there? We’ve made it easier to add entire seasons of episodes from a show to your queue. Visit a show page, and at the top of the list of episodes for that show, we’ve added a “+ all” link. There will be one “+ all” link per season of that show. Click it and all the episodes from that season will drop into your queue at once.

If you like to create your own ordering of videos in the queue, one that cuts across multiple shows, you can still access the old list view of the queue. Just click on “List View” at the top of your queue, next to the “Group by Show” link, and you’ll access the older, single list layout for the queue.

We hope you find this useful both this holiday season and in the future. As always, your feedback is welcome.

Cheers,
Eugene Wei (eugene.wei@hulu.com)
VP of Product

Hulu for the Holidays continues with an action title to keep you entertained as the Christmas season ramps up. Luc Besson’s La Femme Nikita is now available through the end of the year. It’s the film that inspired the TV series (and myriad other spy shows and movies, for that matter): a petty criminal — that’d be Nikita — is groomed to be a professional killer and, as she becomes a hardened assassin, she’s torn between her alliance to the agency and the desire to lead a normal life.

Like every other Monday, we’re also highlighting a new site feature. Today’s update targets bloggers and website editors, anyone who embeds videos from Hulu.com on their own website. Now you can select the image that appears in the embedded Hulu player before your readers start the video. For instance, the default thumbnail image for this week’s SNL Monologue features host Blake Lively (Gossip Girl) standing next to the Swedish Chef from the Muppets (played by Andy Samberg).

If you’re writing a blog entry about the clip, though, and don’t want to give away the sketch’s punchline, now you can select your own thumbnail image. As before, to embed a video, select “Embed” from the menu on the left side of the video while it’s playing. Your video will pause and the embed tool will appear, allowing you to grab the embed code (with the default image) or create a custom clip by sliding the handles at the bottom of the progress bar to the appropriate times in the video. To select your own thumbnail image, simply move the “Thumbnail” slider across the progress bar until you reach the desired screenshot. Below, for example, I’ve moved the thumbnail tool closer to the start of the video.

As you slide the thumbnail selector over, the embed code updates automatically. When you’ve found the perfect image, just click on “copy to clipboard” and paste the code to your blog publisher, like I’ve done here:

Let us know what you think about the custom thumbnails for embedded videos feature by sending any suggestions or comments to feedback@hulu.com. And don’t forget to visit our Hulu for the Holidays page for the latest updates.

Rebecca Harper (rebecca.harper@hulu.com)
Editor

Behind the scenes here at Hulu, we’re always making little adjustments to make the site better for our users. A lot of these tweaks come about based on our own use of the site, but we also implement a lot of the suggestions submitted to us by our users. Lately, we’ve been focusing on our search tools — after all, we want Hulu to be a better place to not only watch videos, but also to find them, too.

With this mission in mind, we improved our search capabilities with a new feature called Advanced Search, which we’ve unveiled today as part of Hulu for the Holidays. Advanced search offers an easy-to-use interface that allows you to find the exact video you’re looking for — look for it on any search results page, or follow the link near the bottom of the Hulu.com homepage. You can search by a keyword or phrase (use quotes to set off a phrase), search within specific fields (such as Show Title, Video Title, Description and more), and use common search operators — “and,” “or” and “not” — to narrow your results.

The Advanced Search menu also offers a way to limit your results to videos with closed captioning — just click on the appropriate check box. In addition, a family-friendly search option offers an easy way to search for content that might be more appropriate for younger viewers. (The filter will exclude videos that are rated TV-14, PG-13, TV-MA, R, NC-17, NSFW or NR.)

If you search for videos on Hulu often, we offer search operators that correspond with each of the fields in our Advanced Search menu, so you can type in a complete search query directly from the search bar. For instance, you can use the plus sign (“+”) to add keywords to your search string. For example, +jim +pam +wedding calls up videos related to Jim and Pam’s wedding on The Office earlier this season. (You can learn more about search operators in this blog entry or by checking out our updated Search Tips page.)

As always, we welcome your feedback about search or anything you see on Hulu. You can send suggestions and comments to us at feedback@hulu.com. In the meantime, we have a lot more content and site features lined up for the remainder of Hulu for the Holidays, including today’s film, Vexille. Available in dubbed and subtitled formats, this CG/motion-capture title takes place in 2077 Japan, where a tough-as-nails agent, Vexille, is out to expose the country’s dealings with banned robotic biotechnology.

Rebecca Harper (rebecca.harper@hulu.com)
Editor

Today we’re launching tags across Hulu. Those of you who are heavy users of the web are likely already familiar with the benefits of tags as both a classification system and a discovery tool. With the web sprouting up in random directions so quickly, you could say that a bottoms-up classification system like tags was made for the web (and in large part, it was). It doesn’t depend on any single authority to function, yet from the varied activity of millions of users, an organic, flexible, and useful order emerges.

Our video catalog has grown to a size where tags will prove extremely useful. Tagging on Hulu is quick and easy. On each video or show page on our site, you’ll find a list of tags near the bottom of the main page or in the Tags tab to the right of the Discussions tab. Simply check the box next to any tags you think are appropriate to that video or show, or use the Add Tags entry box to add your own.

Click on any tag or enter a term such as “comedy” in the “Search with tags” box to discover other videos with that tag on Hulu. Narrow your search results by adding related tags — for instance, add “satire” to your comedy tag search to find videos tagged both “comedy and satire“.

Click on Your Tags to see all videos that you’ve tagged. Filter the list of all your tagged videos by selecting one or more of your tags listed in the left column. Using this feature you can create custom collections of videos.

One last note: while the beauty of tags is that there are no rules, we do have a preference for separating first and last names with a space, like “tina fey” instead of “tinafey”. That has to do with how we see people searching for names, though again, it’s not a requirement. We’ll also filter out any profanity and normalize your tags to lower case.

That’s it. Tag away! And do send any feedback our way — we’d love to hear from you.

Varun Narang (varun@hulu.com)
Product Manager

Here at Hulu, we prioritize our features based largely on the feedback we receive from our users, and some of your most common questions are related to our streaming schedule for shows that are currently airing on TV. Simply put, we’ve noticed that many of you are often wondering when new episodes will be available. After a lot of work with our content providers, our product and design team, and our content team, we decided to create a page that contains a schedule of what’s to come for the week ahead.

You can find this page, which we’re calling “Coming Soon,” when you follow the “Browse by Date” link at the top of Hulu.com and then click on the “Coming Soon” tab. The schedule will consist of scripted currents from ABC, NBC and FOX, including such as favorites as Family Guy, FlashForward, The Cleveland Show, The Office, Bones, Fringe, Modern Family and more. We are hoping to add additional series to the list over time so you can keep up with your favorites.

Along with the schedule, there are a few new features that will help you manage your Hulu viewing. If you’re a registered user, you can request an email notification to alert you when a particular video has been added to Hulu.com. We’ll also alert you on the rare occasion when that video is late in getting up on Hulu.com. For bloggers and editors, you can also grab the code to pre-embed the video to your blog. (An example is pasted below.) We will swap in the video as soon as it’s available on our site, so you’re free to post your article on your own schedule.

Again, thanks for sending us all of your feedback about the site, and we encourage you to send your comments about Coming Soon to feedback@hulu.com. We hope you find this feature helpful — I know it’s definitely something I’m going to use.

Cheers,
Betina Chan-Martin (betina@hulu.com)
User Feedback Evangelist

Have you visited Hulu Labs lately? It’s a section of Hulu.com devoted to new products and features that are still in beta, so you can share your ideas on how to make these services more useful to you. It’s home to Hulu Desktop (which offers a lean-back viewing experience from your PC), Recommendations, Time-Based Browsing and our Video Panel Designer (a tool that helps you embed multiple Hulu videos to your website), but today we’ve added two new items for you to check out: Hulu Desktop for Linux and Hulu Publisher Tools.

Hulu Desktop for Linux
Since launching Hulu Desktop, we’ve read thousands of comments about the product. Among all the suggestions, there was one that far outnumbered all the others: our users wanted Linux support.

So while we were tweaking the user interface, adding a few keyboard shortcuts and fixing bugs on Hulu Desktop, we were also working on Linux support. Part of our commitment to help everyone enjoy content, after all, is to provide support to all three major computer operating systems. Hulu Desktop for Linux is compatible with both Ubuntu and Fedora distributions, and will support input from hundreds of infrared remote controls. (See the FAQ for more details.)

If you’re a Linux user and want to check out Hulu Desktop for Linux, you can get started here. Since this product is still in Beta, we encourage your feedback. Jump on our discussion boards to share your ideas, make requests and report any bugs to the Hulu Desktop team.

Hulu Publisher Tools
Designed for bloggers, site editors and webmasters, Hulu Publisher Tools makes it easy to browse and discover premium videos — from Hulu and other sites — to embed in articles and blog posts. In addition to content featured by the Hulu team, our publishing tool features a comprehensive directory that offers the opportunity to preview videos and copy embed codes from a single page. Editors can also create custom playlists for Video Panels that can embed multiple Hulu videos in a single unit.

A search bar lets you type in any keyword — “obama,” for instance — and we’ll call up all the relevant videos pulled by our web crawler. You can select a few clips that look good to you, preview them if you like, and copy the embed codes. And if all the content is from Hulu, you can put together a Video Panel in seconds and embed it on your blog, like I’ve done below with some recent clips from Modern Family.

Go to our Labs section to get started with Hulu Publisher Tools, and we always welcome your feedback via the discussion boards or by email feedback@hulu.com.

Rebecca Harper (rebecca.harper@hulu.com)
Editor

When I was growing up, watching TV was largely a sporadic, if regular, event. Each week, an episode of the shows we followed would air, and the family would gather around the TV to watch. Even after VCRs came to market, the capacity of VHS tapes and the slow, somewhat imprecise nature of fast forwarding and rewinding the tapes meant that binge viewing of TV shows wasn’t ideal.

Even in that time, the demand for marathon sessions of viewing existed. It just wasn’t easy. Sometime in the second season of The X-Files, I caught an episode on TV, loved it, and wondered how I could catch up on all the episodes I’d missed. The show hadn’t been syndicated and DVDs hadn’t been invented yet.

The Internet had, though, and so I went onto an X-Files newsgroup, explained my situation, and offered to pay to ship a whole series of blank VHS tapes to any fan willing to dub the first season and mail the tapes back to me. To my surprise, someone accepted, and a few weeks later, a huge box arrived in the mail. I spent an entire weekend locked in my room, curtains drawn, watching some 30 episodes of The X-Files back to back.

Soon after, DVDs and then DVRs hit the market, and, perhaps not coincidentally, studios started to issue TV series with long, serial plotlines that required that you to start from the beginning and keep up with multiple story threads, all intertwined. A TV series like 24 or Lost, with its complex plotlines, is more difficult to imagine in the age before DVD box sets, DVR subscriptions and Internet episode guides.

This trip through days of TV viewing past is a long way of introducing Continuous Play, a new feature we’ve added to Hulu today. Even in the on-demand world of online viewing, we see plenty of binge viewing as people work their way through multiple episodes in a session. Continuous Play makes this easier.

Though it’s a new feature, it’s built off some logic that already exists on our site. As you play a video from your queue, for example, we will pause for a moment when the video reaches its endpoint, and then move on to play the next video in your queue, automatically. Continuous Play expands this logic outside of the queue.

Now on every video player on our site, you’ll see a new Continuous Play bar under the video player. On the far right is a dropdown that shows what playlist of videos Continuous Play is working from. For now, there are three primary types of playlists. One is Your Queue, mentioned earlier. The next class is Collections, which have always been part of our site, but which now play continuously. The last type of playlist is more of whichever title you’re watching. If you’re watching a bit from Saturday Night Live, the playlist will be “Saturday Night Live” and will play more sketches from SNL in sequential order. If you’re watching an episode of 30 Rock, Continuous Play will play more episodes of 30 Rock in sequential order.

Just to the left of the dropdown is the On/Off switch for Continuous Play which does just what is says it does. If you click on a video from Your Queue, Continuous Play will turn on, and your queue will play one video after another, just as it always has. Select a group of videos from our Collections page, and Continuous Play will also turn on. Anywhere else on the site, we’ve left Continuous Play off by default. If you visit Hulu from the same computer, we’ll retain the on/off state of Continuous Play from one session to the next.

On the far left of our video panel, you’ll find the “next video” button. Clicking it will send you to the next video in the playlist. Hovering over the “next video” button will show the title of the next video to the right of the button, but if you want a visual view of the next videos in the playlist, click the “show playlist” button below the dropdown and a carousel will drop down, allowing you to browse the playlist and jump ahead to another video if you’d like.

Continuous Play controls carry over to full screen and pop-out modes as well. Give it a try and let us know what you think. If you’re looking for a suggestion as to where to start, try Lost. We have the first four seasons. Start with the Pilot episode, turn on continuous play, and some 84 episodes and roughly 62 hours later, you’ll have a good idea of how Continuous Play works (though you may have a lot of questions about smoke monsters, time travel and the nature of fate).

Eugene Wei
VP of Product
eugene.wei@hulu.com

P.S.: The title of my blog post is a reference to the novel by David Foster Wallace, which I finished recently as part of the recent Infinite Summer book group. In the book, Wallace writes about a film so entertaining that viewers lose all desire to do anything except watch the film again and again. I can’t help but think of that fictional film whenever I hear of someone who stayed up all night watching an entire season of a TV show.

While autumn doesn’t officially start until next Tuesday, everyone here at Hulu considers today the first “real” day of fall. That’s because it marks the day when some of the most popular shows on Hulu — The Office, Bones and Fringe — return with new episodes. And, of course, we now also have the highly anticipated pilot episode of Joel McHale’s Community and a double-dose of Amy Poehler with the season premieres of Parks & Recreation and SNL: Update Thursday

To mark the onset of fall’s TV season, Hulu has just released some new Facebook applications that allow you to tune in to some of your favorite shows and share your thoughts with other Facebook users as you watch. The Hulu: Watch Now Fall Premieres app offers all of Hulu’s fall premieres — including shows from NBC, Fox and ABC — for streaming on Facebook as soon as they are posted to Hulu. And what’s Facebook without a status update or two? You can post real-time updates as you watch, sharing them with your friends and others via the Hulu: Watch Now activity feed.

If you’re a fan of specific shows, you may want to check out the Hulu: Watch Now apps for shows like The Office, Fringe, House, Family Guy, Heroes and more. You can bookmark these pages and come back to them to see fresh content throughout the TV season.

Also on the way: scheduled Facebook events for the show premieres, so you can plan a time to watch online with other fans on Facebook, no matter where you are in the U.S. The first one is coming on Tuesday for the Season 4 premiere of Heroes. You can also RSVP for upcoming events for other shows, including The Simpsons and 30 Rock, by following the event links from their Hulu: Watch Now app pages. To keep up to date on all of these premiere events, become a Fan of Hulu on Facebook.

Eric Yellin (eric.yellin@hulu.com)
Content Distribution

The team at Hulu continues to refine our search tools, making it easier for you to find more videos to enjoy now that we’re deep into summer. Whether you’re looking for a specific video — pint-size guitar hero Tallan Noble Latz, perhaps? — or simply browsing for something new to watch, the team has made a few modifications to our Search Results pages, as well as our Most Popular and Recently Added pages.

The most prominent change is cosmetic, as we have moved away from our former two-column grid and have given prominent placement to the show you’re most likely searching for. You can subscribe to the show, check on its availability, and get a brief description of the show, but you can easily pinpoint a specific episode using the browse tools to the upper right of the results. For current shows, such as Better Off Ted or America’s Got Talent, we’ll default the most recent episode; for older shows, like Miami Vice, we’ll highlight the pilot episode (or the first episode we have if the pilot is unavailable). You can browse through the episodes available there, or scroll down the page to check out all the videos that match your search.

Your results can be refined using the filter menus — display only clips or full episodes, or sort by relevance or airdate, for instance — and those of you looking for closed captioning can opt for the “cc only” option, which will call up results with that feature, if any related videos are available.

These changes are carried over to our Most Popular and Recently Added pages. And because we really do listen to your feedback, we’ve modified things so that multiple clips or several episodes from a particular season of a show are now collapsed into a single entry that you can click on to expand. That way, you can easily bypass the videos you’re not interested in, but still easily to delve into the content you do care about, like the latest clips from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

And finally, from the Time-Based Search page in Hulu Labs, you can also search for videos based on date and then use the Video Type filter to display clips or full episodes only.

Now that you’ve read all about these new features, give them a try and let us know what you think: send your feedback to feedback@hulu.com.

Rebecca (rebecca.harper@hulu.com)
Editor

An interesting stat I’ve always bought into is that you learn an order of magnitude more about your product after you ship it. For example, only 20 percent of the original Hulu.com code from our beta launch is still in use — we had to rewrite the other 80 percent to adapt to the ever-changing, and often unanticipated, needs of our users. It’s uncanny how users can take features in directions you never thought of, and teach you how to make them more interesting and useful along the way.

To help us learn from user feedback even earlier in our development lifecycle, we’re excited to open up a new Hulu Labs section on the site today. At Hulu Labs, we’ll provide sneak peeks at some of the upcoming releases from our product roadmap, some of which are personal projects and hobbies our devs have been cooking up. From new recommendation algorithms to tools for building custom widgets to a time-based view for browsing your favorite shows, we’ll be sharing a variety of these new creations with you at Hulu Labs and looking forward to your thoughts on how to make these products better.

Headlining our Hulu Labs release today is Hulu Desktop, a new downloadable application that allows you to find and enjoy your favorite Hulu videos in a rich, full-screen computer window that you can control with your mouse and keyboard or any six-button PC or Mac remote control. Hulu Desktop was built by a small group on our engineering team (two devs, one designer, one product manager) who asked themselves one day: how can we make it easier for users to immerse themselves in the great shows and movies Hulu is fortunate to have access to? Our answer was to build a new PC and Mac application that gives users the option to step outside of their browser, keyboard and mouse and into something different. We’ve always aspired to provide the best video viewing experience possible on your “lappity-toppity boxes” and make online video more fun to watch. And working together with our media partners, we hope Hulu Desktop is another positive step towards building a legal, long-lasting service that earns us the right to continue serving you.

As with other Hulu Labs projects, Hulu Desktop is still in beta and undergoing changes, but we’re excited to give you this early look and hear what you think. Please share your feedback with us — the good, the bad, and the ugly — anytime on the Hulu Labs discussion board.

Eric (eric.feng@hulu.com)
CTO, Hulu

At Hulu, we’re obsessed with doing everything we can to connect our users with the videos they love. We are relentlessly focused on making it easier to discover, enjoy and share the best premium video, both on and off Hulu.com.

To continue to deliver on our mission to connect audiences with their favorite content wherever they are — or, as Denis Leary would say, on their “bliggety blogs, facey spaces and tweety pages” — we are releasing a new embeddable product this week: the Video Panel widget.

The new Video Panel widgets are customizable and embeddable, and allow you to post an entire series or group of videos to your blog or personal website. (We’ve posted the Advanced Video Panel widget with popular SNL clips above.) You can check out our Widget Gallery here: www.hulu.com/about/distrogallery, or pick up the embed code for a Video Panel widget from the new Widgets tab on any of the show or video pages on Hulu.

For webmasters interested in configuring the Video Panel’s look and feel and the content available (e.g. show, channel, network, keyword, etc.) to their more advanced websites, we also have a new Video Panel designer. To submit a request for access, please click here.

For additional information about Hulu’s distribution products, check out the new Hulu Distribution section of the website at www.hulu.com/distribution.

Pete
Hulu Distribution Team

Notice anything different? We had a little work done to freshen up the Hulu Blog this weekend.

The new design offers easy access to useful links — a video tour of Hulu, discussion boards and ways to follow us on Twitter and Facebook — as well as popular RSS feeds, recent Twitter posts and handy tags that let you find articles based on topic. We’ve streamlined our tagging so that you can easily find all of our interviews with the people involved with your favorite shows and movies, keep track of all of the site features covered in our blog, and review all the annoucements we’ve made in our short history.

Additionally, you can now search for videos directly from our blog pages (use the Hulu search bar at the very top of the page), or browse our selection of video content, including our Channels, Most Popular and Recently Added pages.

So what do you think about new look of the Hulu Blog? Share your thoughts in the comments, and we’ll consider your suggestions next time we make an update.

Rebecca (rebecca.harper@hulu.com)
Editor

We’ve added some enhancements to search that some of you may have noticed and used already. Even if they’re already familiar tools, you may not have noticed all of them, so here’s a quick rundown.

First up are search shortcuts. For nearly as long as we’ve been up on the web, we’ve offered auto-complete in the search box for common searches, typically show titles. Those searches have always taken you to our regular search results page and will continue to do so, but we’ve now added some shortcut links as well in our autocomplete list.

Start typing a show title in our search box, and we’ll start to show potential matches as you type, but beneath the most likely show title match, we now offer other quick links depending on the show.

For current shows, we know from studying search navigation behavior and from our own usage of Hulu that many users who type in a show title are simply looking to watch the latest episode, so we’ve added a quick link to current shows takes you directly to the latest episode, saving you from having to navigate to the search results page and then clicking on the latest episode.

For all shows, current or not, we’ve also added a shortcut which reads “go to show page” for those of you who want to visit our overview for that show, including a list of all our episodes and clips, user reviews, discussion forums, show descriptions and cast lists, availability notes, and more. We’ve also added related searches to the autocomplete dropdown, set off below a grey horizontal line. All of these should make our search box a bit more functional and help you get you where you need to go sooner.

With that same goal in mind, we’ve also launched support for a series of search operators for those of you comfortable with formulating more complex and directed queries. For a full list of those, visit our new search tips page. The search operators we’ve added are:

• show
• season
• episode
• type
• date
• site
• people
• title

Most of these operators do what you’d expect them to do based on their name, but a few warrant further explanation. To use any of these search operators, put them in your search query followed directly by a colon and then a value. Use quotation marks to specify multi-word values.

If you employ multiple search operators, we’ll treat it as an “AND” and try to satisfy all of the operators. For example, let’s say you’d like to watch every pilot episode for every TV show on our site. You could type the following search query:

season:1 episode:1 type:episode

Voila — every pilot we index, including those that aren’t streamed directly on Hulu. Until I conducted that search, I didn’t realize just how many we track, over 700 at present.

Let’s say you only wish to see episodes we stream on Hulu.com, though, and you’re curious about which of those pilots aired during the 1990′s, the height of your TV-viewing youth (I’d use the dates from my TV-viewing youth, but I’ve already taken enough of a beating about my age from my youthful coworkers). Take the original query and modify it like so:

season:1 episode:1 type:episode site:hulu date:1990-1999

Let’s shift gears. Suppose you’ve seen every episode of 30 Rock and, blown away by Alec Baldwin’s comedic performance as Jack Donaghy, you decide to dive deep into his Saturday Night Live oeuvre, having never been able to stay up late enough to catch SNL over the years. You could use this search query:

people:”alec baldwin” show:”saturday night live”

By the way, just out of curiosity, I modified the query above to use Kristen Wiig, and the number of results returned was over 4X that of the handful of other popular cast members I thought to try. Let me know if you find an SNL cast member with a larger footprint on the site.

For my last search operator example, let’s say you’re standing at the office water cooler on Monday morning and two of your coworkers are laughing hysterically and asking you if you saw the “I’m on a Boat” video over the weekend. You have no idea what they’re talking about but nod and laugh so as not to seem uncool and pop-culturally oblivious. You have no idea what show they’re referring to, but you’re fairly certain that’s the name of the video (which, by the way, is actually a unique situation as most users have no idea what the titles of TV episodes are, one of the unique issues related to TV video searches). Type this query:

title:”i’m on a boat”

And just like that, you’re on a boat, and you never thought you’d be on a boat. It’s a big, blue watery road.

I’ve only just touched on the types of fun, interesting, and useful searches you can execute using one or more of these search operators, either alone or in conjunction with others. Read over our search tips and try formulating some of your own and you’ll be a Hulu power user in no time.

With all of these search enhancements, we know there will still be times when you may scan the first page of search results and realize you need to reformulate your query. To save you some vertical scrolling, we’ve added a bottom search box to our site and will leave your most recent query in it for quick modification.

If you glance at the bottom search box, next to the Search Tips link, you’ll see a link that reads Search Plugin. If you use a browser that supports OpenSearch, click on that link to add Hulu to your browser’s search box options. Popular browsers that support OpenSearch include Firefox, Internet Explorer and Chrome.

Give all these enhancements a whirl and let us know what you think.
Even with all of these updates, we recognize that video search is still one of the areas of greatest opportunity for elevating our users’ experience in quantum leaps. We’re still only brushing the surface. Look for many more Hulu search features in the months to come.

Eugene (eugene@hulu.com),
Product Guy